


I Know You

by Mazeem



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, Fluff without Plot, Hurt/Comfort, POV Third Person Limited, Romantic Fluff, Showers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-04-05
Packaged: 2017-12-07 13:42:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/749167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mazeem/pseuds/Mazeem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-Avengers. Pointless fluff where Natasha is asleep on her feet and Clint has to sort her out in ways that keep his balls attached, thank you, and somehow they sort of almost finally say "I love you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know You

Normally, Clint laughs at those idiots who believe in shit like telepathy. He's a spy; what he doesn't know about body language and the myriad tales it tells isn't worth knowing, so why would he even consider the truth of some sci-fi mubo-jumbo?

But he can't explain why he's just risen from his comfy seat on the couch and has a hand out for the door. Can't explain why his body is suddenly thrumming with knowledge his mind never received that she's back, she's here. He hasn't heard, seen, or even smelt anything but he couldn't be more certain.

He opens the door and sees her standing there, one hand raised as if to knock or put her keycard in. First time he's seen her in nearly three months.

"Tasha," he blurts. His hand twitches as he automatically reaches for her, only to realise what he's doing and stop himself. She reads him before he reads himself, and flinches away. He swallows and takes a couple of steps backwards into their SHIELD suite, both to allow her entry and to give her some space. 

She takes the couple of steps needed to get inside the room and then just ... stops. Her gaze is somewhere in the middle distance. Her face is white and pinched, and her hair is oddly mottled by the remnants of blonde dye. She looks closer to his age than hers.

Clint's chest aches.

"Tasha," he says again, more quietly this time. He reaches for her again, very, very slowly this time, watching her intently. He knows from his own experience that all that's keeping her conscious is adrenalin and that if his actions trip her fight or flight in either direction she'll probably end up unconscious in a puddle of sick. She flinches again but doesn't move away. He puts his hand on her arm; no holding, no squeezing, just letting her feel the warmth and presence. 

They stay like that for exactly seventy three seconds, until she shivers all over and her gaze swims back into focus. 

"Clint?"

He nods, risking a gentle squeeze of her shoulder. She blinks at him, then at their surroundings. "You're back home," he tells her, keeping his voice quiet but his tone firm. "You're safe." She takes a sharp breath in and then a long, slow exhale. Her knees buckle and her eyes close, and by the time she's taking her next breath Clint is the only thing keeping her sleeping body upright. 

He hooks one arm behind her knees and one behind her shoulders and hoists her up with relative ease. The bridal position. The few times he's done this while she was still conscious have all ended with him rolling on the floor in pain. The Black Widow does not get carried to bed like a blushing bride or an infant.

Once she's safely on their bed, he sets about stripping her down to her underwear. Red and purple bruising patterns her ribs. He automatically winces in sympathy, but his next thought is twofold alarm.

Has she been to the medical bay? Those look like they could well be cracked. Are they in danger of puncturing her lungs?

Exactly how out of it is she, that he had carried her in the way that he had, inadvertently putting pressure on the injuries, without so much as a twitch of her eyes? Is she concussed?

Hating himself for doing this to her, he takes hold of her shoulder and shakes her. Not too hard; the last thing he wants is for her to come up completely disorientated. He calls her name in time with the shaking. 

It takes a worryingly long time, but eventually she shifts under his hand. He keeps going as she groans, squirms and squeezes her eyes more tightly shut, and he only stops when she opens her eyes and mumbles something Russian that sounds insulting and ends in "Clint".

"Natasha! Nat. I need you to tell me if you've been to medical."

She blinks up at him. He repeats himself. Her eyes widen, and one hand moves slowly towards her bruised torso. 

"Yeah." The word is barely more than a voiced exhalation. Her lower lip twitches as she speaks, and Clint has a heartbreaking thought that she might be trying to smile reassuringly at him. 

"Yeah, I've been." That emerges as 'Yuhvbin', but Clint isn't phased. He can understand her in English and in Russian; in French and in Latin; in drunkeness and in silence. He has always been able to understand her. 

She falls straight back to sleep. He strips and gets into bed next to her, because he can't help but want to protect her right now. To drop a kiss on her forehead; something else he's not allowed to do when she's awake because it's childish and foolish and so she hates it. 

He doesn't lie there watching her, because if she wakes up and senses it somehow with her weird Natasha-skills, she'll kick him in the balls. Instead he listens (higher deniability) to her breathing and feels the warm weight of her body distend the mattress next to him. 

The hours tick past and he dozes but never drops off completely. Despite this, by the time he senses a change in Natasha's breathing and rolls to look at her, she is already looking at him dazedly. 

"Morning," he says, inanely. Her eyes flick to the alarm clock, then to the window where the remnants of dawn are still brushed across the light blue sky, and once she's confirmed the truth of his statement, she returns her gaze to his as if waiting for the next one. He knows that feeling only too well, of waking up so groggy that he's flailing for things to solidfy the world, so he feeds her another titbit: "How's the ribs?"

He sees the exact moment the pain registers in her face. 

"Sore," she answers. Her voice comes out very hoarse and grinds almost instantly into a short, dry cough, which is itself immediately cut off by a gasp of pain. She turns a shocked glance his way, and he shrugs. He doesn't know whether she was asking about the ribs or about her clearly rough throat, but since he's equally clueless for both, he figures that's ok.

"Want a hand showering?" He lets her realise that she's in her underwear and prepares himself to argue with her about accepting help. He knows from many, many experiences that painful ribs make every act of living harder, from cleaning one's teeth and washing oneself to breathing. However he also knows that Natasha and he are a pair alike in this way amongst all the others too - they won't accept help unless they honestly don't think they can do it alone.

"Yeah, ok."

Shit. 

She's herself enough to glare daggers at him as he tries to help her upright, but now that she's sitting up against the headboard and her face is in daylight, he can see how thin that veneer is and how desperately drained she still looks underneath it. 

She gently touches her ribs and winces. Hell, he wants to wince just looking at them; they were nasty enough last night while presumably still relatively fresh; this morning what was normal skin is red, what was red is purple, and what was purple is almost black. Once they age for long enough to bring yellow and green in too she'll look like a kid went crazy on her chest with Crayola.

As if she's telepathic, she puts her fingertips flat against a couple of the bruises and lets out a laugh so soft to avoid pain that it is practically just a breath.

"You didn't go to med last night, did you?" They would have put ice on the bruising at least. She frowns at mid-air for several tense seconds, clearly trying to remember.

"I did," she answered slowly, "I just left after I'd got a good look at the X-ray."

"Maybe you should go back to sleep for a bit," he ventures. She rolls her eyes and throws a pillow at him. It glances off his shoulder. He's sure he should be concerned about her missing his face from this range; he's just in awe of her self-control.

"If you tell me I need a shower, Barton, then I really need a fucking shower." She goes to tuck her hair behind her ear but stops after the first tentative swipe. Clint assumes she's finally been caught by the sharp ache of her torso, but no; "And if I can't reach my hair then you're washing it for me, because it feels like it's been dipped in a chip pan and this blonde stuff has got to go."  
He smiles despite himself. "Fine by me." 

She refuses help to stand either, just hugs a pillow for support and pulls a face. Clint reaches the bathroom before her and props the door open with his foot while he rummages in their medicine cabinet. 

"Clint, I don't need anything." She sounds exhausted but defiant. A dangerous combination; it's how Clint spent the first twenty-five years of his life. Whereas last night exhaustion made her look forty, this morning's brittle front plastered on over the pain and tiredness makes her look barely twenty.

"Oh, so you like chest infections and pneumonia? Knew you were kinky, Nat, but that's a bit weird."

She bites her lip. "Don't make me laugh, you bastard."

"I can't help being innately hilarious." He fills their toothbrush glass with tap water and holds it practically against her lips. She rolls her eyes but takes it and the pills he then gives her; two paracetamol for the pain and two ibuprofen for the swelling. Meagre, but he had finished off the last of their filched presciption opiates when he had kidney stones two weeks ago.

"You know that I can take pills dry," she mumbles, wiping her mouth with her the back of her hand. He leans in and plants a quick kiss on her wet lips. 

"I know that you don't have to do things the hard way anymore."

She smiles, a tiny crooked thing, and kisses him back. 

The shower really isn't big enough for two, but they've made do before and they can do so again. He gets in first and fiddles with the temperature until it's just right. She follows; presses her back firmly against his chest and tips her head back to rest against his shoulder. He tucks his face against the stretched line of her neck and puts his arms around her gingerly. The rib damage counts out most of the torso area so he ends up with one arm round her hips and the other high round her shoulders, nearly across her neck. It's so close to a fighting hold that he's certain she won't be able to stay like that, but instead of going stiff she makes a pleased little noise and covers his hands with her own. The breath shudders out of him and he rests his open mouth over a tendon in her neck, rolls his tongue over it once or twice.

And ok, if he stays like this for much longer he's going to start getting ... well, pleased to see her. And while post-mission "Thank fuck you're back, and in one piece as well!" sex isn't new or even that unusual, she would probably fall asleep during it, and that, ok, is not his thing. 

"Maybe later," she whispers. He blinks and lifts his head to stare at her. 

"Did I say that out loud?" 

She shakes her head from right to left. Their faces are so close that their noses are flattened together. 

"I just know you," she replies in a voice that's probably supposed to be sarcastic but comes out way more like she's just said "I love you." Which she sort of has, in Natasha-speak. To know a guy's tells intimiately, well, that pretty much used to be her job. But to admit to his face that she knows him inside and out while she's so vulnerable that he could almost definitely take her down? Clint's heard declarations of love from a lot of women in his forty years of life, and even some who meant it, but none of them ever hit him in the solar plexus like that just has.

"I know you, too," he says in return and does not kiss her again because then he doesn't think he'd ever stop, and he doesn't say anything else because all of a sudden his voice is shaky. So he blinks a couple times and gets to work. Shower gel. Shampoo. All that shit.

It doesn't take long, though, before she starts to seriously flag. Her legs shake so badly that one foot slides from underneath him when she tries to shift her weight so he can reach the small of her back, and only his reflexes stop her falling. He clutches her to him in that same parody of a fighting hold and wishes there was enough space in the shower for them to sit down. Her breathing is fast and irregular, and shallow too, thanks to the ribs, and if there's a better recipie for hypverventilation he hasn't found it yet.

"Gimme thirty seconds," he mumbles into her neck. She mumbles something in return that sounds sort of like agreement. As he rinses the suds from her hair and body, he feels her go rigid with the effort of controlling her respiration. She's concentrating too hard on that to lift her head when he asks, so he does the best he can. He's a marksman, godammit, he can keep a jet of water out of her eyes. 

He gets her back to bed afterwards by picking her up and carrying her again. She wriggles in his grip and swears in all the languages that Clint understands, but she could get free if she really wanted to and they both know it. 

She falls asleep almost immediately. He closes the bedroom door very, very softly behind him and heads over to the kitchenette to wash up yesterday's evening meal. Once he's in that frame of mind, he finds himself looking for other things to do as well, and all of a sudden instead of cleaning his bow, doing some maintenance exercise and then reading his new book, he's straightening the cushions, wiping away the mess that accumulates when he spends more than an hour at rest anywhere, and just generally _tidying_. 

Several hours later, a cushion hits him hard, knocking his face sideways and his book onto the floor. The bookmark skitters out.

"I was reading that, bitch," he grumbles, brain on autopilot. Then it catches up - Nat - and he turns so fast that his neck clicks. She's glaring at him, hefting her favourite hairbrush. It's lilac. Her face has finally returned to its usual colour, and her hair is a mass of soft fuzzy red curls.

"I promise, Barton, one word out of line and this is going through your skull."

He grins so widely that it actually hurts. "Why the fuck would I be worried about you, you crazy bitch?"

She rolls her eyes and throws the hairbrush at him. A hard throw, overarm, but aimed carefully, and he catches it without needing to look.

"You tidy when you're worried. And you're worried because you're an idiot," she answers.

"Takes one to know one," he replies automatically. He chucks her the hairbrush. She catches it and resumes fighting with her hair.

"Thanks," she says as she walks away. He grins again, and picks his book back up.

"Any time."

**Author's Note:**

> All feedback welcomed, hope you've enjoyed reading this! :)


End file.
